This is an edited version of Jim Sedlak's speech at STOPP's Second National Conference focusing exclusively on the evils of Planned Parenthood, in Rapid City, South Dakota, August 2 -3, 1991.

Planned Parenthood Sex Education is built around public schools and most of what I talk about is going to be in public schools, although you can extract some of it in the Catholic school area. Alan Guttmacher in l973, after Planned Parenthood had gotten abortion legalized in the U.S., said that their job was not yet done. Their next job was to get sex education in all the schools, we will win the battle for abortion through sex education, they said. Guttmacher told his people:"" Don't worry about what is going to happen right now, what is going to happen right now is the pro-life forces are going to raise up and there is going to be a lot of fighting over this issue; we are going to raise a sleeping giant so to speak. There are going to be a lot of abortion battles and we are going to fight all of those battles, but the most important piece of the fight is to get to the kids because while the abortionists are out doing abortions, and while the pro-lifers are out fighting today's fight, we will be after the next generation and the generation after that. If we can win the next couple of generations in the schools, then we don't have to worry so much about the abortion battle because we will eventually win". That is the ground work that Guttmacher laid for his people in l973 and they have been following that path ever since. They have embarked in a real struggle to get sex education made mandatory kindergarten through twelfth grade in every school district throughout the U.S. They did it behind the scenes for the first few years but in l986 they went public with their goal In April of l986 Faye Wattleton, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, announced two corporate goals for Planned Parenthood: mandatory K-12th Sex Education in every school district in the U.S.; and school based clinic in every school district in the U.S. At that time, there was only one state that had mandatory K-l2th sex education, that was the state of New Jersey, and the District of Columbia had it as well. She announced it at a time when she had only 49 states to go; since that time approximately 2l additional states have joined and now have mandatory sex education K-l2th.

Planned Parenthood is clever about how they go about that battle. I'll give you an example of the kind of thing they do so that you can become aware of the tactics they might use, to try to get mandatory sex education in your state. What Planned Parenthood does is it raises an issue that you feel more strongly about than sex education, and let's you win that one while they win theirs. For example, in New York City, Planned Parenthood put forth a program and got school chancellors to endorse this program for a school based clinic in every school in New York City. The parents went up in arms over these school based clinics and said: "we can't allow these school based clinics to come in to the schools". They fought against the school based clinics, and they fought against the New York City School Board of Education and they won the fight. The New York City Board of Education passed a resolution saying it is not mandated to have school based clinics in every school, but in the same resolution was a statement that said, "But it is mandatory to have K-l2th sex education," or "family life education" as they like to call it. So although we thought we had won our battle on the school based clinic issue, Planned Parenthood had actually achieved their real goal, sex education in the schools.

Currently in New York state there is a bill that we managed to get killed in the state assembly. The New York School Board of Education is distributing condoms in the schools in New York City. There was immediately a resolution in the state assembly to outlaw the distribution of condoms or any other contraceptive device on school property in New York State. Obviously everybody jumps on the battle wagon to get rid of these condoms, but buried in the bill was also a paragraph that says: "Family life education K-l2th will be mandated in New York state." Fortunately we spotted that and the bill got killed this year, it did not get passed. That is the typical tactic of legislation. Planned Parenthood will find an issue that you feel strongly about and knows that you will fight for a bill to get rid of the school based clinic or condom distribution, and in that bill they will have wording to achieve their goal, which is K-l2th sex education. So whenever you are fighting any kind of a school associated bill in your states or in your cities, make sure you read the whole bill and understand what everything in that bill says, because typically you will find some wording in there that says what Planned Parenthood is really after, sex education.

What is wrong with that? Shouldn't our kids be educated about sex, about how babies are made, etc. so that they can avoid that? The problem is you have to understand Planned Parenthood's version of sex education because that is really what they want. To understand Planned Parenthood's version of sex education we can go back to another one of Alan Guttmacher's statements. When asked what his view of a perfect society was, he answered that a perfect society was one in which when young people got to the age of the decision to use or not to use contraceptives, they would choose to use contraception as naturally as breathing. Their programs are indoctrination programs, not education programs. Their programs are intended to take kids from the youngest age and to give them a mind set, so that when they get to the age of l2 or l3 and they are reaching puberty, and are getting inundated with all these sexual messages, that they will choose contraception as naturally as breathing.

Planned Parenthood will tell you that contraceptives are important because they prevent abortion; they will tell you that they have prevented more abortions than pro-lifers ever will because of their distribution of contraceptives. It is interesting that Dr. Louis Tyrer, the medical director of Planned Parenthood, wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, where she said that two-thirds of all unwanted pregnancies in the U.S. were caused by contraceptive failure. She cited numbers saying that there were 3,000,000 unwanted pregnancies, and so 2,000,000 pregnancies unwanted are caused by contraceptive failure. It is not that these devices will prevent unwanted pregnancies, the whole history of research on the use of contraceptive devices says that the more you push it in a society, the higher your abortion rate goes. The reason for this is that they all have some kind of failure rate; there is no perfect contraceptive other than abstinence.

Two years ago Planned Parenthood published an update on the failure rate of contraceptives. Their best device, which is the birth control pill, according to their numbers failed 2 to l8% of the time. So on average, their best device fails l0% of the time; l out of l0 times their device is going to fail, and that is their best. The other various devices, the diaphragm and all that kind of stuff, some of them fail more that l5% of the time; they have all these failure contraceptives. When you get a society, especially teenagers, and you convince them that contraception will protect them from pregnancy, they will engage in sexual activity much more frequently because they feel protected. They have no inhibitions at all to engage in sexual activity for fear of pregnancy, because they have been told that these contraceptive devices will protect them. So the frequency of intercourse goes up, and the frequency of pregnancy goes up. There was an article of a study published in the Wall Street Journal on October l986 by Stan Weed, a man who did research on all the sex education programs and school based clinics programs in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal article reported that when these programs are put in a school district or into a city, the pregnancy rate increases, the abortion rate increases, teen birth rate decreases, because they have more abortions, therefore they have a decrease in births. That is important in the Planned Parenthood lingo because we tend to equate the word contraception and the word birth control. Planned Parenthood (PP) is in the business of birth control, not contraception; as long as you prevent a birth they are happy. If you show them statistics, as we have, that says teen sexual activity has increased, teen pregnancies have increased, abortion rate has increased and teen births have gone down, they will say that is a success! Planned Parenthood does not talk about birth rates, because birth rates would be too well understood, so they talk about fertility rates. Fertility rate to Planned Parenthood, if you see in any Planned Parenthood literature is actually birth rate. PP says that after their programs are established, fertility rates go down, and people say that's wonderful, that means less people are getting pregnant. No, that's not what it means, "fertility" means birth to Planned Parenthood. Therefore that is why births go down and they are very happy with that, the fact that births go down because abortions go up is inconsequential to them, they have no problem with that whatsoever. So they will talk of these things as successes when they really are not.

PP will come into your community and convince your school board of the need of these programs talking about the teenage pregnancy problem. Most people don't understand what counts as teenage pregnancies, and it's important that you do. If you have a young lady who graduates from high school at the age of l8, she marries her high school sweetheart and they settle down, he gets a job, she stays home. A year later she gets pregnant, she's l9 years old, she is a "teenage pregnancy," it's counted along the teenage pregnancy statistics. Teenage pregnancy statistics have no relationship to married or not married, to out of school or not out of school; teenage pregnancy is any women under the age of 20 who is pregnant regardless of the circumstances. That girl, l9 years old, married, trying to raise a family, in Planned Parenthood lingo, is one of the bad guys because she is a teenage pregnancy. When you look at the numbers, on the national average about 50% of teenage pregnancies are to l8 and l9 year olds, and about 75% of those are either married at the time of conception or married prior to the birth of the child. So when Planned Parenthood talks about teenage pregnancy in your community and tells you that you have an 8% or a l0% teen pregnancy rate, the first thing you should do is mentally cut that in half, because what you would normally think of as a teenage pregnancy, which is a l5 or l6 year old girl, or l2 or whatever, wanting to go to school but finding herself pregnant is only about half of whatever the number is that they count. You can get the actual numbers for your area from your state health department. They hike the teenage pregnancy problem and they come in and try to sell these programs to the schools. If this is going on in your community, the first thing you should ask of your schools is to show us some proof that these programs work in reducing teen pregnancy. Give us a study, give us something that tells us that these programs work, because the fact is that they don't. Planned Parenthood, after l5 years of having these programs have no evidence that they work, in fact there is a lot of evidence on the other side. They have no reports. I used to travel around the country and I'd go into Planned Parenthood offices in every city, and I would say: I am a visitor in your town and I would like to get sex education in my school back home, but I have been meeting a lot of resistance. Can you give me your report that shows that this stuff works to reduce pregnancies, so that I can take it back home and convince my school board to put sex education in the school? And no Planned Parenthood organization was ever able to hand me such a report. PP has never provided any of our people anywhere with this kind of report. They don't have it, because they don't work, they don't reduce teen pregnancies.

The Planned Parenthood program in Mount Vernon, New York was the model sex education program from Planned Parenthood for the country. The first time it went in was in l979, PP paid for the entire program, all the materials, the teacher training, and for the teachers that actually taught the course. They paid for everything, because this was their model program. The first year it went in, it went into the fifth grade class. Starting with the second year it was taught routinely on the fifth through the eighth grade, four years of school in elementary school. It was a six week program every year on sex education. They changed the name of these programs, they used to be called sex education, and when people wouldn't buy that they called it "family life education." Now they are calling them "human growth and development courses." It's all the same program, they just keep changing the names as people find out about them. The family life education program in the Mount Vernon schools was funded initially by PP and then PP got the New York State Department of Social Services to do some funding of it. The teachers were taught by Planned Parenthood over the summer, and then went in and taught the courses during the year, and they had in the Mount Vernon, a women whose sole job was family life education coordinator. Her job for the school was to do this program, and she was a full time paid staff person to do family life education. This was their model program, and it existed in relative obscurity from l979 through l985.

In l985 there was a woman whose son was in the fourth grade in Mount Vernon, who looked into what her son would be learning in the fifth grade, and found out that this program existed. She asked to see some of the material that is taught in the program, and became totally outraged. She mounted an effort to do something about that in her community and then went through a several years effort to try to get this taken out of the school. During that time there was also a school based clinic installed in these schools; so they didn't only have a family life education program, they had a school based clinic. Mount Vernon is a high minority city, about 80% minority population, and it was not the only large minority city in the county, although it was the only city in the county which had this sex education program. They wrote to the State Department of Health and requested the teenage pregnancy statistics for the city of Mount Vernon and Westchester county from l978 through l984. What they found was interesting, over the time period l978 through l984 teenage pregnancies in Westchester county decreased, while in the city of Mount Vernon in those same years the rate increased. New York records statistics on teen pregnancies by age groups, l0 to l4 years old, l5 to l7 years old, l8 to l9 age group. What they found was that the most significant increase in teen pregnancy during those years in the city of Mount Vernon was in the l0 to l4 year age group. If you remember, this course was being taught in the 5th through 8th grade, the kids that were taking this course were the ones getting pregnant. This was not happening elsewhere in the same county where people were unexposed to this course. It was damaging evidence, but this is not unusual, these programs don't work in reducing teen pregnancy and they certainly don't work in reducing sexual intercourse amongst teens.

As we were fighting this program, we told the school superintendent in Mount Vernon that the program delivers a message to the kids that says its okay to have sex, just don't get pregnant. He denied that and we went back and forth on this in a meeting. It ended with that unresolved and we had another meeting two weeks later. When he got into the next meeting he said: "By the way, I just want to clear up one thing that was left over from the last meeting. During the last two weeks I talked to three senior girls, whom I know very well, who had all gone through this course, I asked them what the course taught them and I talked to them individually. They each told me the course taught them that it was okay to have sex, just don't get pregnant." He then began to take a look at his program, not a very hard look as it turned out, but he looked at it.

Faye Wattleton (PP's ex-president), was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in l987, as saying: "Planned Parenthood would not be an organization that promotes chastity." They don't believe in it; they believe in sexual freedom. Planned Parenthood through Faye Wattleton also said, when she accepted her award for humanist of the year in l986 given by the American Humanist Association: "Too many of us are concentrating on stopping teenage sexual activity, that should not be our focus." They have no problem with teens having sex. They think that is the teen's right, they have a free right to have sex at any time, anywhere, as long as they don't transmit diseases and they don't get pregnant. Those are the only restrictions. You can be a responsible teenager as long as you use contraceptives, that is the message that they give to teens.

In that program, people say, what can you teach kindergarten kids about sex? I'll tell you what their kindergarten program is and this is straight from the Planned Parenthood model K-twelfth sex education program, one that they have been pushing throughout the New England states for several years now. In kindergarten there is no physical contact, but a boy and a girl stand facing each other and name all of the parts of each others' body, including the genitals and the buttocks. It's an attack on modesty, they are trying to break down the actual modesty that children have so that later on these children will be open to all the other suggestions that they will give them. By the time they get to third grade in Planned Parenthood programs, the teachers pass out cellophane bags, ping pong balls, and straws, and the kids make models of the reproductive organs, again in a co-ed class, an attack on modesty. Modesty is broken down in the early years, and then PP gets them into the real heavy stuff around the fifth to the seventh grade.

The Planned Parenthood programs are aimed at conditioning kids to use their products, their contraceptives, to accept their mentality of the world, and ultimately to accept abortion. Remember this whole plan is so that they win the abortion battle, along with other ideas and other philosophies they want to win this battle for abortion, because they need abortion. They couldn't sell any contraceptives, if they didn't have abortion to back up the contraceptive failure. Planned Parenthood makes a lot of money from contraceptives, Planned Parenthood is not some benevolent organization with volunteers who hand out free things to everybody. In New York, any charitable organization that takes in more than $25,000 per year has to file an annual form with the office of Charity Registration. That is available to anyone that wants it, it is essentially their financial statement for the year. So we annually get these financial statements on all 2l Planned Parenthood affiliates in New York plus their national office which is located in New York City. In l985 one affiliate of PP listed contraceptives as a specific entity and said in their return that they purchased contraceptive supplies that year for $60,000, and they sold those contraceptives to the general public for $250,000. They made a $l90,000 profit. That is a nice rate of return for just one little local affiliate and they have l72 affiliates around the country. We broadcasted this all over the place and the local executive director had to answer us in the newspaper. He said: "We have been accused for being in the contraceptive business; our answer is that is our business, that is what we do."

Planned Parenthood is non-profit, so how can they make such a significant profit? The answer is that they take everything that comes in and they take it out in salaries, by paying themselves salaries. So it is now a deduction on the book at the end of the year and they wind up basically even. A non-profit organization simply means that there are no stockholders, there are no people that are going to benefit from a capital investment, it doesn't say that they can't pay themselves a salary. Faye Wattleton while she was president, received an annual cash salary of $l84,000 per year, that is not counting any of her paid expenses on clothing and other things. A typical executive of a Planned Parenthood affiliate will make somewhere between $30 to $60,000 a year. The bigger ones, like in New York City, make over $l00,000 per year. PP has an annual budget of 330 million dollars. About half of that comes from you in one form or another, either by federal or local tax money. About 70% of that is paid out in salaries, so about 200 million dollars is paid out in salaries.

Now, how do you sell your products? You have to find a market and the market is the kids. To get to the kids you have to get into their schools. In a school district outside of Kingston, New York, PP went into a seventh grade class and passed around contraceptives and a price sheet. They then told the kids that it was cheaper to buy contraceptives from PP than from the local drug store. It's a marketing campaign, and that is what the sex-ed program is, other than trying to win the abortion battle, they are marketing campaigns. I mentioned that they have an objective to put school based clinics in every school district. The organization in the country which most advocates school based clinics is a group called Center For Population Options out of Texas, headed by Joy Dreyfuss, who used to be on the board of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. They go around and they push for the sex-ed classes and particularly for the school based clinics in the schools, and part of the pushing is that they provide initial funding; this comes from an organization called the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. This organization gives money through recommendations from Center for Population Options to localities to start up school based clinics. The Robert Woods Foundation gets its money from the stocks in the Johnson & Johnson Co., one of the subsidiaries of J&J is Corporal Pharmaceuticals, which makes birth control pills.

So Planned Parenthood gets in the classrooms and they start in with these sex-ed programs. The early ones are to break down modesty, then they get a little bit more graphic in their descriptions. It's not that they describe the function of the human body, we do not object to a biology course. Planned Parenthood advocates how to education, it is not how the body works, it's how to have sex, how to engage in sexual activities and their books are getting very graphic on how they do that. They also put a big push in their books to separate the procreative and recreative areas of sex. They push recreative sex, we have seen one book that they have for 7 year olds, in which they specifically state while making babies is certainly important it is not the main reason why people have sex. Margaret Sanger (PP founder), once wrote to her granddaughter and extolled the virtues of premarital sex and told her granddaughter that three times a day was about right. This whole recreative and free sex kind of idea is something that they continue to push.

If you want to know if this stuff is in your schools, it is fairly easy to find out. Go into your schools and look into the health curriculum to the fifth grade and the seventh grade. You will see how they treat three subjects: abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation. If you can read your fifth grade and seventh grade curriculum and totally agree with how they treat or don't treat those three topics, and it's in concert with your religious beliefs, then you probably don't have a problem in your schools. They are very big pushers of masturbation, and you will find it in all your manuals.

Planned Parenthood in addition to having this whole business of contraceptives, is also in the business of spreading a doctrine on humanism. For those of you who are not familiar with this philosophy of humanism, I recommend that you pick up the documents called the Humanist Manifestos, they describe what PP thinks is humanism. Basically they say that there may or may not be a God but it doesn't make any difference because he doesn't have anything to do with what goes on here on earth. There is no heaven, there is no hell, this is it, there is nothing after this. There are no values, no absolute values; values are autonomous and situational. The references to look for in your curriculum: there is one organization that produces most of the literature for sex-ed and it goes by two names, the ETR Association or Network Publications. This organization located in Santa Cruz, California, began its corporate life as the education arm of PP in Santa Cruz, and then split off into a separate corporation. They publish most of the widely used sex-ed manuals and they have a monthly magazine called Family Life Educator, which they send to the teachers. More than names, look for the ideology that is in there. When you get into the subject of humanism, humanism says that man is responsible for himself, God has no responsibility. There is a statement in the Manifesto that says that there has been discovered no divine purpose for the human species; their whole philosophy is that man is responsible for everything, there is no God, etc. They come along in sex-ed courses and they push masturbation because it turns you in on yourself; it convinces you that you do not need anybody else to satisfy any of your needs or desires.

Now they get very offensive and you will find some really atrocious stuff. They will get very graphic in their descriptions, so bad, that you will be embarrassed to read it. In fact most of the times one of our techniques for fighting these programs is to take this program to school board meetings and to read them out loud in these meetings. The school board will shut you up real quick and tell you that is not suitable for a public forum. Then you ask how you can allow this to be taught to my kid in school? It is just a way to illustrate the point, but most of it is that graphic. We had a case in Connecticutt where a father was called to school because his daughter, in eighth grade, was being disciplined because she refused to participate in the health lesson that day. The health lesson for that day was to draw a picture of their mother and father having intercourse. His daughter refused, and her father supported her. There was a big fight and finally the whole thing passed over. I talked about the fact that they called it sex-ed, family life education, human growth and development. They also sneak them in under a couple of other names such as child abuse prevention or AIDS education. There is nothing wrong with teaching a child abuse prevention course, but you have to look at the course to see if it crosses the line between education and breaking down the modesty of children. For example, you can teach a kid about child abuse by telling them that no one should be touching your body in any part that is normally covered by a bathing suit. Kids understand completely what that is, at that age especially. The offensive programs then go a step further, and insist that the kids learn the technical names for all the parts of the body covered by the bathing suit. That is not necessary for child abuse prevention, you don't need to know all the technical parts or the names of the body taught to you in a co-ed class in order to prevent yourself from child abuse, or to know when child abuse is happening. So when I say child abuse prevention, I am only referring to those courses that are aimed at breaking down the modesty of kids. That is the kind of thing that you have to look for in those courses, that is how they break down their modesty.

The good news is that you can do something about these programs. You can get them thrown out of the schools. It has been done many times in many places.

There is a whole movement in this country to make schools the social center of the area. You don't need these social engineering courses so get them thrown out of the schools. It can be done. We have been involved in a dozen school districts and we have been successful in ten of them. We went into two schools, where the people were so far into the humanistic philosophy that it just couldn't be done. We did succeed in lessening the impact; in getting a lot of the programs modified but we were unable to get them out. In those cases, parents may have to opt for home schooling to really get their kids out of that environment. In 80 to 90% of the cases you can do something, you can get it out of your schools. You identify what it is, and then understand that it is your local school board who has the authority as to what gets taught in your schools. Ultimately it is your local school board minds that you have to change. Local school boards normally comply of 7 to 9 people, in some places only 5. There are only 4 to 5 people that you have to get thinking right in order to change your entire school district. You set out to get that majority in your school board. If you have people whom you've determined after a couple of years that you can't change their minds, then you run candidates against them. School board elections typically are not very well attended; if you can get some churches together in your area and generate some real support, you can get some really good people elected in your school board. All you need is the first one, as soon as you get the first one elected the school board starts to take it real serious, because they all know they might get targeted next.

The other thing about school boards to understand is that they operate on a school year. They operate mentality wise from September to June, they know that they are going to have problems that arise from September to June, but they also believe that next year its a new problem. When you are fighting this year and you don't get what you want and then you go next year and you are still fighting again, they don't know what to do, you go on with the fight. Once in a while they will schedule a vote, and they will vote, and vote to keep the program in the schools, so what do you do then? The answer is that you go back to the next school board meeting and you continue the figh. And they'll say, but we voted on that last month, you say right, but you didn't vote correctly so let's keep talking. You just keep going back, and be persistent; persistence is the key word. This battle is a battle for your kids' minds, hearts and souls; this battle is where they are out to get your kids. The kind of education they are giving our kids in some schools districts is already starting to work. They are winning the battle because they are changing the minds of our future.

We can't stop our fight, we have to go out and do all that we need to do, fight legislature; but we can't ignore the fact that they are in there getting the next generation and we have to be in there protecting our kids from these people, because they are in there pushing their agenda. Their agenda is going to be one that is not in concert with Christ's teachings or our religious beliefs. If you don't do anything your kids are going to lose the battle, and they are not even going to know they are in it.Our purpose is to beat down Planned Parenthood's influence and allow their programs to get to the parents. There is an organization in New Jersey called Teachers Saving Children and they are fighting a lot of these programs in their schools. How many people does it take? Only one dedicated person.

1. Pamela Maraldo was the President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.